when will the snow go away

If it weren't a breach of lawyer confidentiality law I'd start recording conversations I have with my boss. Not because they're particularly hilarious, just odd and funny to me.

"I'm gonna run off into the treacherous snow, Steve. I'll be here tomorrow."
"Well tomorrow is, as Scarlett O'Hara said, another day... another day in which there is four days' worth of work to do. But we persevere."
"At least the city isn't on fire."
"Indeed. And if it were, we could throw snowballs at it."

It is definitely time for me to find a new job. God, change.
____________________________

Last night I dreamed I had to babysit my friend's baby, except in the dream it was this bald newborn infant. It was all floppy and I tried so hard to take care of it but kept accidentally knocking its head against things and slamming its fingers in doors and hurting it while carrying it around. It didn't cry or anything, but I could tell it was disappointed with me. Then I remembered that babies need to have their diapers changed, which I'd forgotten to do. The baby's clothing began to fill up with liquid shit, which oozed out the neck hole while I tried to find a clean place to change it.

This is much like the dream of bizarre responsibility I had a couple nights ago, where I had to get married, to a guy I knew in 6th grade but haven't seen since. It was an "arranged marriage" where the guy had to get married to inherit his father's business in Beatrice or something, and I agreed to for some reason. Throughout the dream I was trying to get ready for this wedding I was not at all excited for; it felt like some duty I agreed to commit to in apathetic martyrdom, because it was something to do. With a half hour to go before the wedding, I realized it was inappropriate to wear a short black dress.

Do not try to marry me or leave me near your children.

It's the last day of 2009, that's weird.

days coming

I was up half the night worrying. My mom always used to say that, "I was up half the night worrying," and I wonder if this is what it felt like, heart beating so fast you can feel it thud deep into the bedsprings. I'd ask her what she was worrying about, and she'd say "You know, you guys and... everything."

I started falling asleep again after my alarm had gone off a couple times. I had what can only be described as a lucid dream; it started with me sky-diving without a parachute and landing softly on dry hard earth like the scrub of an elementary playground.

Then there was a bird in the tangled roots of a tree, with the head of a cardinal but a bright blue body like a jay. My non-dreaming self was suddenly very aware that this bird was a dream, which was an amusing and hard-to-describe sensation. The bird was now a lark, blue and tan and freckled. Non-dream me reached forward in the dream, slurring out forced non-dream words: "Hoowwww arrrrrrreeee youuuuuu birrrrrd?" Then I woke fully.

bluster

I keep trying to graft some kind of "oh what a special day" feelings onto today but it's not working. The most special holiday feeling I am having right now is smelling the bacon my downstairs neighbor is cooking, and knowing that I have thick-sliced bacon in the fridge. I feel the same way when I walk into my building after a long day and the same neighbor has made the hallway smell like a sweetly acrid pine tree. I like this neighbor; he has a cough and I hope he feels better soon.

None of this lack of xmas joy is meant to imply negativity. N(eg)ativity. I am potentially having the best X-mas of my adult life thanks to no familial responsibilities. Thanks to being able to sit around all day and feel my bicycle-legs atrophy some more, and not having to talk to anyone I don't wish to. Thanks to the bacon in the fridge, the rendered fat of which will make my leeks and onions tender for soup. I am going to make coffee soon; god, this pleases me. The snow feels isolating and right; I am feeling decadent in my warm and wind-blown tower. The everything of things still looms but for the past few days I've tripped the breaker back to a baseline of calm, thank you body, thank you mind, I needed.

dec-

For all the presumptions I make about the episodic nature of identity and events, I never presumed my life could feel so neatly divided into decades: the pastoral late '80s bled into the '90s, which tasted humid, like candy and sweat. At the turn of the millennium things grew sharper and more brittle, I plated myself with chrysalis-armor and withdrew though it cracked still.

I am making generalizations; they are inappropriate. What I mean to say is now I find myself at a cusp, in the same positions, but different, and in different positions, but the same. This body feels tough and unfulfilled. There isn't a child here anymore, though; there cannot be. When there is not a girl or a woman or a mother or a lover, can I cease for a moment.

I need to find a way to de-justify my various internal karmic jihads. That is to say, I am aware that only pain is invited when I go about in a state of deserving, even with concurrent awareness of the eternally troubling imbalance of everything.

What does one do with oneself.

What does one do with oneself. When youth feels like winter. Is this a consequence of having already lived though the greatest fear; life becomes an anticipation of pain, regeneration is slow and the story loses elements each time you tell it, becoming fanciful, this is being passive, perhaps. Aggression, too, does no favors.

I am growing less indignant with all of this, you know, just working it through.

well

(pukes on floor)

i graduated!

ugh god

I am just... I'm sorry, I'll be okay in a minute, this shit's really throwing me around.

Everything is cool.

hello again

the process is becoming more rapid-fire

soon it will be streamlined

and the voice in my head that never really goes away, i will come to regard it more fondly, and it will comfort instead of taunt me, it will keep saying "stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore" and i will be, i will be

melatonin dreamin

My apartment was a half-rooftop affair and I was having a party. People came, among them a tall, stunning man with long dark hair and a necklace strung with fragments of human skull. He leered devilishly at me and said, "I have one question: Why didn't I take you to bed with me last night?" To which I responded with shy confusion, as I'd never met him before. He drew me in and tried to kiss me but I demurred and he pecked my unresponsive lips and held me tightly while I passively tried to show disinterest. Then I noticed his ears, which were stretched down to his shoulders but not just one hole, many in a row, like a flesh honeycomb full of beautiful inch-or-bigger plugs in ebony, bone, horn, and metal.

I went down the stairs of my apartment building, the walls were crumbling and everything was coated with dust. At the front door was the boy I really wanted to see, who kissed me once, then again and said, "Since I didn't kiss you last night." I went back to the party and he didn't, I guess, dreams are weird.

The next rooftop over was just an odd mess of scaffolding and platforms. An old bearded man in a wheelchair was precariously teetering around on it, artfully dribbling a basketball. We watched and gasped as he wobbled and cheered as he avoided falling; long-haired hippy girls danced and cackled.

A very short woman approached me with her even shorter child, like a doll, and demanded that I let her child take a shower. I crouched awkwardly to talk to her, then stood, feeling like I was being demeaning. "I don't know who you are!" I said, and she became indignant. "I didn't say she couldn't use my shower, I've just never met you and I don't know who you are," I said, plaintive. After her child presumably showered, the woman had turned into the woman from church who my mom basically forced me to babysit for once when I was young, the only time I've ever babysat, and it was horrible. She was mousy and extremely pious. The dream-woman felt bad for yelling at me and gave me DVDs of all of my favorite shows from adolescence to apologize.

That is all I remember enough to write. i know dreams are esoteric and not very interesting but f u it's my blooooogggggg~

pen alt

I'm not sure how I ended up in an empty classroom in Andrews, drinking coffee and crying, but it feels right.

There's a lot to say; too much.

This morning in the snow-sharpened sun there was a long white hair on my windowsill. As I got dressed I found another hair, clinging to the lace edge of my bra, short and brown and the softest I've ever felt, like a rabbit, like a puppy in a dream.

I begin to feel parts of me freeze and burst and rupture, like a cellulose plant structure, leaking and wilted. My apartment fills with a cloud of dust that doesn't dance and coil in the sun-beam like my cigarette smoke but hangs and lingers and makes me almost scream. All over the ground is abrasive with salt and grit.

I never scream; You've never seen me scream. I mean heard.

If you were to go back through everything I've written here tabulating the most used words or phrases, I bet dollars to donuts it would be

I feel

I feel

"I feel"

this is not intentional; i wish i could turn it off

just give me a damn minute

College was a child in the arranged marriage between myself and my life.

I don't know why it always felt like such an end-game. Now there are six pages, a study session, a test, and some grammar trees between me and the abyss.

I don't want to be like you.

end times

the time-line has become quietly apocalyptic

it is good to be drunk

initiate

I dreamed that my sister was getting married and I was talking to my dad right before the wedding, trying to convince him that spending tens of thousands on this wedding was stupid because she'd only met her boyfriend a month before. My dad was in high spirits and wouldn't listen; the boyfriend was a good Christian and that was all that mattered. The wedding procession continued down the street, my sister and the groom riding a big bay horse and my dad leading the way, me at his side begging, "Don't do it!"

I remembered last night the time my sister and I almost got lost in the rocky mountains in winter. In retrospect our situation was never precisely dire, but we (probably around age 9 and 7) wandered away from my mom while hiking a familiar path. Our mood was exploratory until attempts to get back down the mountain led us further from our originating point. It was getting dark and my sister and I were wading through snow up to our waists and it felt like we were so, so alone on that mountain, and abstract concepts such as "freezing to death" which don't generally trouble middle-class little american girls started solidifying. I told her not to cry and helped her, we made it down a steep embankment to a path that led us back.

I was surprisingly not loathe to walk to class through the snow this morning. I was still steaming with residual shower heat and swaddled tightly, if unstylishly. There is something calming about this drastic morphing of the world, it is so extreme that prosaic acceptance of it precludes other worries and restlessness. My body says to my self, we are walking through the snow, feel your feet lengthen and arch, becoming lycanthropic to assist you. Everything pushes forward; we bound on our toes and the snow doesn't care.

in the jungle

your screams are mistaken for amorous bird-calls

december

a damp powder-keg

is brought in from the snow.

it dries as a new-born foal

and tests its gritty lungs.

in celebration,

the townspeople agree

to replace the word "please"

with "if you love me."

the usual

Dreamed of my cats falling and getting hurt; when a cat is first mortally injured it turns into a demon that moves and sounds like a droplet of water on a hot cast-iron skillet.

The dream got better, there was a telephone conversation with a kind stranger. It was experienced as a telephone conversation in a film might be, with the camera cutting to only the stranger's lower face as he spoke.

Then, a forest, it was misty and the lighting made it seem as though the air was constantly on the edge of refracting itself into vibrant color. I was with a group led by Sir David Attenborough, who was explaining the various animals that scuttled peacefully around. I came upon an iridescent black bird, which turned its shiny head to reveal a severe crossbill. I beckoned my friend next to me, grabbed his arm excitedly, and said, "Look at the crossbill!"

dreams like this are nice because i mostly feel like everything else sucks pretty bad

first world problems

did you ever literally weep in self-pity?

you feel stupid later

tgiving 09

phones ringing in empty restaurants

dad and i will eat gyros downtown

far away, mom evangelizes, and means well

the guy at jake's thought i asked for two packs of menthols

i asked for only one but say nothing, too shy

they will have to be used as trade goods with the natives

not much longer

All the old people lately seem obsessed with telling me how things go downhill.

"You're in the best time of your life!"

I want to tell them to

shut the fuck up;

that I already feel my clockworks,

heavy heavy cogs and gears

so cold in alaska

apparently

I don't actually sleep anymore, i just fall drunkenly into bed at the appropriate hour and mostly roll and curl myself into different positions, dreaming intermittently.

I wish I could afford to get the hell out of town for awhile. I will go to a different city and meet someone without hang-ups. Someone who will take my hand and say, "All that other shit and those people you know? I don't care, I like you, let's have fun." We will have fun. The person will, late at night when there's smoke crowding the lamp-light, tell me something about myself that is true and something I have not already presumed or heard. The person will have the most beautiful point where jaw, ear, and neck intersect, and will tuck my nose there as we sleep.

There is no money for such trips, though they are imaginary ones. I feel i am always working, and there may be no person I trust not to quickly bore or hurt me; I haven't been out of lincoln over-night in over a year. After I typed that sentence I wanted to cry, but instead i will drink some water. Yes, this is complaining.

Normally at this time of year I'm making lists and anticipating winter break. Now I spend nights trying to plan out my life in long, obsessive thought patterns as I lay in bed. I see my friends languishing. There is so much languishing.

the law of the spiders

if the spider climbs into bed with you

you are under the jurisdiction of spider-law

there is no return

you will become a queen

a queen of the spiders

as queen your duties will consist

of scuttling into cracks;

embroidering corners;

do not worry about lacing

your eight elegant leather boots,

there are handmaids to assist

ringing ringing

On Sunday mornings I can hear the church bells, different peals from different churches around the neighborhood, at slightly different times; I don't know what they signal, whether it's church beginning or ending, the church I went to growing up was low and modern like an office building and didn't have bells. Bells are funny, communal objects. Why does a bell ring if it's not meant to be heard by and mean something to a group of people. The study of bells is called "campanology."

I took a bath that was too hot last night and woke up uncovered at 3 a.m. on my couch, brittle like a clay pot that's been fired and cooled. Full of pent-up vibrations like a bell that ain't been rung for ages. Bats in the belfry.

These past few days I've come to a sort of calm acceptance of my moods. Not calm, but unsurprised. There is nothing new or shocking in my general disappointment with my days; I do not expect _________ (I could not decide what to write there but anything fits). The profundity of my forced patience for something that moves me makes it difficult to allow myself relaxation anywhere else. I sit and compel myself to finish reading the chapter of the book I'm enjoying instead of feverishly biking the streets of downtown. I tell myself to stay in the bath-tub just a few more moments, though it is hot, because what else is waiting for me except passing out on the couch, cold.

I have been having trouble with time. Generally when I slip into a daydream it's not hard to lapse back into real-time and continue with my day, but when the daydreams end lately I'll find myself disoriented and unsure of how much time has passed. It feels like waking up without a clock next to you, and having to guess how much time you've been gone from the world. I usually find that what felt like it might have been an hour was only a few moments.

There is a nice lack of screaming in my head, just a vast, windy pla(i)n(e).

I'm never quite sure what normal is.

times that i spilled hot tea on my mother's new macbook while teaching her to use it

2

watch out for my heart

my heart-beat has

started to be too strong

and/or fast,

a staggering thoroughbred,

making my

eyelids twitch,

it sounds like

cracking gum in the

stairwell of the library,

inside i am a pulp,

it is making the bed lurch

across the room,

i can no longer sit next

to anybody or my heart

will beat them up,

busting ribs,

swinging punches

sat.

Dreamed of being in a new place, and a small but vicious lizard. I found the lizard's nest in a flooded room, with a clutch of soggy eggs. "Are these your babies," I asked the lizard, holding one out as evidence. It was oblong but chicken-egg-sized, white with a tinge of pale pink like new milk. The lizard responded by pooping out another egg, this one smaller than a jelly-bean, then returned to terrorizing a bird. "You are a terrible mother," I told the lizard. I cupped the large egg in my palm and felt for life. It soon began throbbing with a subtle heartbeat and emanating warmth; it was cold-blooded and I was giving it my heat. This scared me slightly; "Don't take it all," I whispered, not sure how I felt helping an invasive species survive.

This morning I have too much to do and I've been following the block of sunlight across my living room. Every labor just seems so fruitless.

walking and smoking and spilling coffee

Today at work I picked up the beige touch-tone tele-phone and called myself,

I didn't answer --

an alien voice said "hi sarah's voicemail, leave a message if you feel like it"

I mashed a few keys, in groups of four, to see if somehow

there was a portal to be opened on this line;

The right combination could reveal a soft accidental curve

where time loops back upon itself,

and I upon myself.

Always I am picking locks:

this is life inside the exceptional mimic.

The ro-bot operator [roboperator], evidently loathe to explain to me

again

my options, sympathetically told me:

"I'm Sorry!

You Seem To Be Having Trouble!

Please Try Again Later!"

The line went dead.

son of a bitch

is it embarrassing

to admit how much more comfortable i felt with ears and a tail and a little black nose

scamper scamper

today is warm and blanketed with delectation; refreshing wonder

(dance break)

fuck you

but mostly,
fuck me

today walking to get coffee before work the air was dry and wet at once, very non-emulsified, I guess. The davinci's on my block was flatulating out great smells of bready pizza and I was momentarily transferred back to the playground in elementary school, being outside in the chill and the humid pseudo-food smell bringing anticipation of lunch.

I had a bad day, which is when I wrote the initial fuckyou nonsense. These are periods of particular self-loathing; the trees looked like this when I was staring out of metal-mesh encased windows on the fourth floor of BryanLGH in the white room with no locks on the doors. I'm an adult now, I can't take a break from life for a few weeks anymore.

i hear

a sound like springs like

in a body-filled bed

no too rhythmic like

someone's jumping

on a trampoline,

remember trampolines?

coming around

I try to write funny things but they all seem to come out as grave and tragic as ever, the words snaking around themselves and becoming overwrought. I guess the source of writing is description and lately the me I document and self-describe is odd, sensorily overwhelmed; damaged.

ha ha ha, trite

Also: I was volunteered to read at this reading the 13th and have no idea what the hell i'm going to read and everyone will judge me harshly and i need mental support regarding this from my poetry ladies what should i read aaagh why did i agree to this no really i'll be fine it'll be great

gold morning

The structuring of days has shifted, some never

managing to start while others over-exist,

stretching with the same hollow trembling muscle sounds.

A boyfriend calls your phone, and starts explaining things;

embarrassed, you wonder, "Is this my boyfriend?

Did I forget about him?" You feel you must be the worst girlfriend,

to have forgotten, to have so thoroughly ignored.

His real girlfriend grabs the phone from you.

"Am I her, actually? Did we mix things up?" How awful

you are at being a person. There is a sensation that I

am slowly going deaf, but as my hearing goes my eyes

get stronger, or not eyes but seeing, bigger and brighter.

She is on the aluminum grating of a cold cement kennel floor,

hunks of flesh cut from her thighs and hips,

Oh well, I think, I suspected everyone felt them too large

but was being polite to spare me. She is now

lighter than your convictions, more pleasingly

malleable. Men pass in groups of two or more and

you feel when they are going to tell you something

about your body just before they tell you; they tell you,

she tries to counter-act by turning invisible but

their pewter monkey eyes see still, stinging.

I have decided to neutralize herself I mean, myself.

"I'm in love with a deer," she says, turning into

a deer. "He is tearing me apart."

The leaf-lost negative space presses too firmly,

you push back and are ricocheted and it hurts.

unrelated things that don't mean anything

G. Kuz. gave me this form today to give him permission to publish a wack-ass sestina i wrote freshman year in some crazy book of undergraduate sestinas. I'm in the stacks now and I just pulled the form out of my pocket and read it - he also wants essays from the authors and suggested we use the following titles: "How I Wrote My Masterpiece" or "Taming the Monster" or "I Hated It Until I Loved It." I started laughing really high-pitched through my nose to myself and then realized that there are people near me silently studying.

I have this terrible nightmare fantasy that if he publishes this sestina I wrote and later in my life anything else i've ever written or created is destroyed in a (insert planetary disaster) and the sestina book will be the only thing that survives of me, forever. I will probably let him though, so he stops making a b-line for and standing in front of me in the hallway of Andrews whenever he sees me then talking to me all manic while standing way too close while I am obviously uncomfortable.

I just counted the different fonts/font sizes used on the form. There are twelve.

It's been raining all day. I have a meeting in two hours and didn't to bike home then bike back to campus. This morning I experienced the first feeling on my back of "Shit, I am almost literally too spent to keep pedaling" because the wind was into my face with the rain and I was soaked and my thighs so cold and unresponsive. But I made it.

I lately have the impression of me as one trying to cram oneself into the ideal molds everyone worth pleasing has set forth. Not in a martyry way, something more lost and desperate. Please let me please you. If anyone were to ask how to please me, I would never tell the truth, but I would want to. Inside I am always wondering why nobody asks me. This may be narcissism.

I have been thinking about commonalities, the little threads that tie us together.

It seems that they grow brittle with time if more are not added. I guess I just see a day when we've all talked about the good old times too much, the Kuz, shared acquaintences, etc. Already some of the people we continually bring up in social gossip-style conversation, I realize I have seen these people maybe what, once? twice? in the past couple years.

That one thing we once did together, those times we had. We're just going to sit around talking about them forever, aren't we. This is what puts the dull in adult.

I fear the withering of things that used to please me.

reciprocity and symbiosis

i am bored, i am always so bored

Dear Neighbor B2:

I have only seen you about three times since moving in eight months ago. I have not yet discovered the reason why, on each of those times I've seen you, you have been wearing nothing but small black boxer shorts. You seem nice; polite and articulate and a little shy. It is possible I've only ever seen you emerge on laundry day. I just want you to know that I behave just as awkwardly with people who are wearing more clothes, and that I am okay with you, and what you wear.

I hope my walking and/or singing while doing the dishes doesn't bother you terribly.

-C

week-end

this feels okay i guess

girls, girls, girls

another week

when matters is mattering or

not mattering

getting up

somewhere the time of me has gotten off; 7:30-noon passed in a half-sleep half-dream as a baby kangaroo, traveling in a bed and a satchel with joey legs sore and jutting stiffly out.

a frosted glass strawberry pendant with gold seeds dangling over my head, the hair-stylist's fingers tracing heavy circles on my scalp and she floats above strawberry-blonde, bathing and singing sweetly to the music; a chasm of a dream opens and she leans while my eyes are closed and kisses me fingers tangled in my hair knowing it with more grace and skill than i who grew but cannot tend it

i always have these strange dreams of women who are paid to touch and groom,

and end up feeling vaguely like a john

i will be able to get out of bed soon, now almost one,

someone in my building is cooking something that smells so good and it makes the gray outside somehow less menacing

what a frenzy inside, always

feeling like a little poison one, a dis-ease bringer,

begging

in public

the muttering homeless guy saw me crying at thirteenth and p,

from behind my sunglasses i saw his eyes go wide and sky-blue with wonder

waste a girl

"The universe was once conceived as a vast preserve, landscaped for heroes, plotted to provide them with appropriate adventures. The rules were known and respected, the adversaries honorable, the oracles articulate. Today the rules are ambiguous, the adversary is concealed in aliases, the oracles broadcast a babble of contradictions. One struggles to preserve, in the midst of such relentless metamorphosis, a constancy of personal identity." (Maya Deren)

when i touch my cats the electricity in the air makes the speakers chirp

i can't seem to stay intoxicated enough

there is a song playing behind the wall

and somebody

jams and jars

in the general lability of things

i've again lost the vocabulary for me

preservation

can be so starving

amber hardens details

ice firms the frames

trips along

a flip book peep show

honey crystals

still sweet

buried deep in heavy

peat-moss

how can it last

long

-ing

weekend: autumn

i have no-body to impress

the last day of september

what is the reality and consequence

of existing in such a state

the prehistoric locust leaves yellow

as does my skin, glazing sallow and waxen

cold as a lizard, the chameleon, why

shouldn't i eat only air

the sun warms only one of my hemispheres

who ever said such a thing as a horizon exists

when it always does, but still never

my edges and insides co-mingle, lungs

crumple and soon i will open my mouth wide and

keep opening and split down the middle as

a succulent fruit,

sometimes sleep lets me forget

i am an illustration of a pomegranate

in an outdated encyclopedia

i roll cigarettes for mice, sometimes

losing the paper in the crevices of my

fingerprints,

young carrie fisher is my wife

she does lines of o.c. off my hip-bones

and sucks them until they are pink

self-portrait age 23

work rant 9/25/09

hearing the receptionist on the other end of the line
pick me up from hold, pause, sigh, and hang up
yes, i think, yes
this 30 lb. battery backup plus surge protection
one more dismissive aphorism from my boss and it is
going out the window
broken glass and crumpled mini-blind wings
it started an unrelenting high-pitched shriek earlier today
now thought it is unplugged that is all i can hear
the same tone when i was on hold, three beeps in a lonely vacuum
the company it came from has a nice trade-in service but
but, i've spent the last two hours searching through files for receipts to find out if the battery actually two years old and out of warranty or not though my boss recalls having the battery since before he moved offices two years ago and the model is discontinued on the website
so i asked my boss, are we ready to just trade in, it is a nice deal
you know
on the same brand that has served us well for at least over two years
he tells me to call some computer repair people he hasn't worked with for over a year
ask to speak with the owner, as for a general opinion? or?
"just ask what he thinks"
instead i got the receptionist girl, who put me on hold, picked me up, sighed, and let the phone drop back down
which is exactly what i would have wanted to do
fuck this shit
this is just goddamn ridiculous

interlude

(click for wet fun)

occupation

general learning ability verbal numerical spatial form perception clerical perception motor coordination finger dexterity manual dexterity eye / hand / foot coordination color discrimination strength climbing balancing stooping kneeling crouching crawling reaching handling fingering feeling talking hearing tasting / smelling near acuity far acuity depth perception accommodation color vision field of vision weather cold hot wetness noise vibration atmosphere moving electric height radiation explosion toxic / caustic other directing repetitive influencing variety expressing alone stress tolerances under people judgments

colorstrology

the color defines you, the color coyly strokes your ego, let the color into your life

this serves as a more general "oh god i'm getting older again soon" reminder

dreams > waking; viking

Of meeting a young man, tall enough to startle, who introduces himself. He's not from here, but some nordic country. His long hair is ice-blonde tied back with a white cloth and his eyes are ice-blue; he is such a combination of sunshine and ice that the effect is, naturally, blinding. He's introducing himself, but his name is lost in the glare and you ask him to repeat it, smiling and holding up a finger, "one more time, say it?" He says it, and again you do not hear, some snarling of syllables in the throat. You smile, he smiles, who needs a name, so unspecific and predetermined. You are on the flank of a mountain in the spring. He shows you a plant, a large shrub of icy-green tendrils and as you look closer you see the small glittering round leaves.

almost everyone i know

is punishing him/herself.

fuuuuuuuuuuuuck

"fuck"

sometimes i just want to lay and stare

i ain't interesting, hi.

just need to keep reminding myself how okay things ultimately are, and will be. "the screams" crept back these past few days and as much as i expect them especially around fall every year but it is so much of a bodily sensation paired with a mental state that i mostly don't know how to avoid it. I started calling it "the screams" because when you get a bad dose of the screams it feels like deep in the back of your skull there high-pitched female death shrieks, unrelenting, though you're not really hearing anything and it's not quite so literal. It gets almost impossible to focus on anything but the state of uncomfortable, trembling dread; it gets harder to breathe and you feel a little like throwing up, but mostly you feel like your skin is about to leap violently off and what you really want most is profound physical pain, to claw at your arms and pound your legs and slice your face and be beaten with strong fists to make it go away, this indescribable brain-rape.

things that need doing pile up; bottles of liquor drain like they've got no viscosity; the screams wake up with you one morning and you realize they've been coming.

this sounds melodramatic all typed in my words and really like, i'm fine, i can function. but if i describe it maybe i can recognize it and identify it and soothe it; i mean, i get by fine, some times are just wretched and i am wretched but i am strong

you got somethin' i need

plans

Sometimes you're in the shower and realize the longest parts of your hair are over halfway down your back.

Your life plans start shifting to include some kind of epic rat-tail the next time you go crazy and cut it all off.

You are then forced by the weight of this decision to realize that this is perhaps your most solid future life plan.

Why does everyone keep asking.

omnes

tonight i saw the first real smile in a mirror i've seen in a long time

i was thinking about latin class

wdnsdy

Scrubbing the gross linoleum in my kitchen, perched on the balls of my feet in a childlike squat with a lint-riddled sponge in my hand, scrubbing scrubbing like I've got something to atone for. The oven is preheating for dinner; I haven't eaten yet today and each time I stand up to rinse the sponge in the sink I glide on a sickening wave of a head-rush, the heat and fumes and hunger coating my vision with resin and making my mind go blissfully, soaringly empty.

Then, back to the task, mopping the floor by hand like a downtrodden woman in a silent film, I imagine my face reduced to just eyes and nostrils and lips on a shapely white mask. I am thinking about my day.

The waking to thunder; the steady ongoing rain. Spent an undeservedly-paid few hours reading about the Powhatan women, and I remember them now, laboring intently along the banks of the Chickahominy river, handsome and strong, arthritic by thirty. They worked together in small groups out of necessity, digging for marsh roots, weeding the corn. A pair of women wererequired to make a hut, each scaling a sapling-pole until the tips meet and can be bound together. At night, after a day of working to ensure continued survival, everyone danced, then they fucked.

My scrubbing wrist is starting to feel odd: weakness/numbness/tingling that worries me after reading it in so many medical assessments of disabled individuals. Today I walked through rain with a red umbrella, past bodily-compromised humans I'm happy not to be, frog-like ones in electronic wheelchairs; a stroke woman with one dead stiff leg and an arm curled up against her side. "Never leave me," I say to the rhythm of my feet as my legs carry me swiftly across concrete rivers of purring cars.

In class, familiarity. A friend, rare and dear, was unexpectedly there in the now-too-cold air of the theatre. Kan was all dripping dark curls and dripping crimson knees following a rain-related bicycling incident. He smelled sweet and wet and fresh, like the raw rising dough of cinnamon buns and crisp apples. I'm pretty sure he doesn't read this. If so, sorry kan, I smelled you.

There's no poignant end-point to all this. I'm tired of writing, and my wrist is still weird, and it's time to eat.

lizards

Dream:

A woman with short-cropped blonde hair toured me through the upper level of an abandoned brick building, which had been transformed into a large apartment of sorts, with one expansive room that sunk a level into the floor with stairs leading down.
"We had to re-create the frogs' natural environment in order for them to survive," she was saying, leading me down into the lowered area. "We imported their native soil and water. The fungus should not reach them here." As she spoke, the room began filling with water. It swelled my chin and crept up over my mouth and nostrils. "The frogs are quite picky," she said, disappearing inconspicuously. A loose cloud of small fish approached; retreated among the ribbons of light. The underwater room lost its borders; my feet sank gently into the sand floor. I had not yet seen the frogs, though I understood them to be elusive. I did see a large black fish with fins so feathery it looked like a billowing garbage bag, moving with purpose.

I climbed the staircase out of the underwater room and was confronted by a six-foot-long monitor lizard, leathery pouch of a throat swelling and constricting. He bounded up to me and I thought plainly that I finally understood people who fear large, excited dogs. My body kept cringing away, which interested the lizard more, his head tilted and curious. "That's Jeremy, he won't hurt you," said the blonde's voice. Jeremy's tongue extended two feet in front of him, a rope of bubble-gum tipped in black, and sucked back into the small, handsome arch at the center of his snout. I still did not quite trust Jeremy.

again everything just bewilders me, etc., repeat

Why didn't humans, like the frogs and salamanders, develop more ways to cope?

The same essential species, but each adjusted to excel in a specific way which enables life processes. A clutch of transparent spawn clinging to the underside of a leaf. Pouches on either flank, pulsating with tadpoles. A frothy lair under the desert sand, sitting in wait for months or years. Poison ribs that push through the skin, heal, push through again, heal. Communication reduced and simplified to the loudest chirrup or the most elegant arm-wave.

My cats wake me up early.

One of them might die; they will both die someday. I will die someday. If he dies, I say, I can help more cats that need love. I have so much. I need to stop letting this consume me. "If I had all the money," I think, with clownishness that I feebly use to try and cover up for a notion so ripe and wrinkled that it makes me hate myself to know I think it so automatically -- if I had all the money! I could fix things. I could fix so many things. I fix things now. There will never not be things to fix.

Tools, tadpoles. Instead of evolving pertinent physical ways to cope with survival all I've got is this brain and these thumbs and these tools this human unrest; this eternal whisper of "fix, fix, fix."

People I haven't seen in awhile ask me how I'm doing; it's different than being asked the same question by someone you talk to frequently. You're forced to assess in broader terms. Invariably, I answer truthfully, "I'm great, I'm really great." Considering my placement in a vast, nebulous timeline is a comfort.

I can take a bath. I can take a blade and make my shins smoother than taut doeskin.

I can spend time with friends whose voices hit my ears like those of family members, such familiar tones, I can conjure up in abstractness with no words attached. Disembodied flute, pitch, and lilt; the memory of sound pairing this information certainly somewhere where it stores music, a web of vaguely defined memory and association. File under "brother/sister." React accordingly.

My friend leaves an imprint of his mammal warmth on the couch; I sit down on it and it's such a shock, this residual energy. I realize it's the closest I've felt to really touching another person in a long time and something cracks, like an eggshell, in the hollow where throat meets trunk and trickles strange pain down my ribs. I don't know if this is being lonely; I don't know if I'm allowed to be lonely.

thurs

This morning my bedroom is cool and blue. There is something like the taste of raw broccoli in my throat, fresh and bitter and fibrous. The cat woke me up with her needle-fingers on my scalp too early, when whiskey still had me tied up in a dream (A man who had been in love with and dismissed by me decided to court my mother, with great success. I found this to be entirely inappropriate and enraging).

I should like to have some coffee.

to-dos

· Clean bicycle. I feel like the guy who buys a motorcycle because he's always thought they were awesome, but doesn't know how/is a little scared to ride it. So he just keeps tending to it, and talking about it.
· Ride bicycle somewhere.
· Perhaps go to garden; people want eggs. I am the bringer of eggs. I'm frankly scared of the glut of tomatoes and peppers; cannot cope with the waste.
· Watch a dang netflix so I can send them back and get more nature documentaries nature nature nature always always teach me sir david.
· Write a dang letter to Mandible; I compose them in my head so much, believe me. Today is the day I drag Alma out and commit!
· Pay dem billz.
· Stop writing lists of things to do later while at work, "working."

but who

I just typed an entire entry and deleted it out of mental embarrassment for my own triteness.

It's this headache, is all.

Why this, then -- I am telling you not out of some adolescent desire for attention (though that is ever-present, of course), but maybe to illustrate the withholding, the "not enough" which is just, just silly and stupid but, you know. I'm sorry, I'm not sure why I'm here. Everything is not quite right.

Soon I will have a drink of water and my body will go on living. But who will touch it.

a kind of aggressive coral red pink that contrasts teal blue

I've never worn lipstick, nor much make-up at all really beyond colorful eye paints, meant to decorate but not conceal. I took a tube of lipstick from my mother, who no longer wears it. The color is called "Eager". I'm not sure what this means, but I like what it's doing to my mouth; my wryness levels.

hhhhhhhhhhhhh

it overwhelms, often; i'll raise my head and it's been a week of soundless, breathless time, hurrying past like water,

this river feels like chaos, bashing my awkward frame until i become not an animal but a spine that hurts, shoulders are not wings, hips are not magic, when i dream i touch your arms with such lightness and intensity, wanting to feel without the clammy grip, seeking out the delicate hollows where skin lies over tendon and vein.

this is confusing. you cannot know. i want to bite you, you thing in the river i cling to, let me tell you a story:

once there was a girl who was

good enough, and strong enough

work feels strange today

every new piece of information doesn't settle neatly but spirals into fractals of increasing complication
a day when your pulse give your whole body a rocking sway when you sit still and there's no breath to catch, like your lungs are two sacs heavy with sand and mucus, shoulders so taut and clenched that with every cartilage-scraping motion they feel closer and closer to crushing themselves pulverizing and hollowing bone and re-forming sprouting into giant pseudo-reptilian wings muscles coil and twitch and spring through the glass of the window and into the sky on the wind free and screaming and screaming and free in the sky on the wind screaming and screaming and screaming

august, saturday

this heat

i can see my cats' bodies

pulse and twitch with their hearts

or breathing

then realize i'm doing likewise

a throbbing creature

face shining with minerals

Artemis/Diana carved in marble

flesh soft and sticky and salt and magic

my family and i sit

fighting these ways in which

our planet attempts to kill us

I have too many chiles. Peppers (serrano, cayenne, jalapeno, etc.). So many I don't even, I don't even know. The two ways in which I can store them are "dry" and "cold," neither of which I am, so the project waits.

I was trying to write about how I'm hot, and I complain about being hot, but it really doesn't bother me anymore. I am highly and reluctantly adjustable, to anything.

This flexibility frightens me a little. Whom will I be tomorrow; in a year.

friday friday friday

existing in a state of semisolid
semi i don't know
vapor, in the air

There's a growing rift between consciousness and body.
Mostly contempt for it, what it wants and thinks it needs. The aches and nerve-ends tingling, like coral polyps, seeking attention.
I do a pretty good job of punishing her thoughhhhhh~

life in the undergrowth

I dreamed about cockroaches; well, first I dreamed I had to go back and live in my old apartment again, one of the few recurring nightmares I have. Everything was very clean, and my cats would not communicate with me with their eyes or bodies. And there were cockroaches everywhere, small wispy-antennae'd cockroaches dragging the corpses of other bugs into their holes.

RE: Storm. I could see the lightning in my sleep and anticipate the loudest thunder. Thusly I rode it as an orchestral score.

My walk to and from class there were bugs everywhere, it seemed, shiny oblong black beetles careening toward my feet, my feet that always feel slightly pigeon-toed for some reason lately since my foot-stab injury or maybe it's just from wearing the same pair of sambas for about three years now. I got the old pair of sambas out of my closet from before this pair, and they are now in better shape than the current ones, but they don't feel right. I need new shoes, but I'd rather be able to afford alcohol. This is a lie, I can probably afford shoes right now, except I live in constant fear of veterinary bills. There was a dead beetle on the floor when I got home.

I feel as though I am constantly about to trip over myself. I feel folded into myself everywhere, wincing at the sharp beams of eyes I can see inspecting me from behind my sunglasses where they can't tell I'm looking back. The laser antennae gaze, assessing me in an animal way, friend-foe-food.

By some coincidence, we watched "Them!" in class today.


This all feels stupid, I wish I could stop feeling so stupid. I am nibbling a crisp-rice-marshmallow treat my coworker bought me in a motherly way. The sugar fuels my small activities. If I keep the tasks simple and linear, my brain won't overload with the longing for the elsewise and the moreso. The last time it stormed I slept on the floor with my head on the couch where it still smelled so so good, making me throb about the throat and chest. Soon I will communicate only in pheromones; smell for them. Perhaps soon I will also find some way to release this inner pressure valve and become efficient with everything.

last night i slept for four hours, and woke up every hour, and every hour when i went back to sleep i dreamed my whole life. every two hours, there was a small cat mewling in my window, and on the alternating hours my whole body shook with the noises of lawn mowers and hellish, caterwauling garbage trucks.

the valves shift open

Yesterday my mom said she had "some of my stuff" to drop off with me; I said "okay." She then arrived with a very large tupperware container which held almost all of my adolescent miscellanea. I am having a strange time confronting this box, each time opening it and recovering some object that scratches the waxen coating off of memories I've long daubed into obscurity. The object right on top was the last birthday card I ever received from my grandma, who died right before my birthday the next year, telling me how life keeps getting better once you go to college. So, I started crying, and then became very self-aware of my crying, questioning just how crocadilean the tears may be, questioning my questioning. I feel as though a lot of people have a kindred ancestor and for all our differences I have, since her death, since learning about the nervous breakdowns and electro-shock, felt that she is/was mine. That it seems like half of my household possessions once belonged to her only furthers this. The bed she died in is in my guest room. I think of her often, in small quiet rituals; it started soon after her death with the crossing myself whenever I got a "bad thought" going that wouldn't shut up, but this became awkward and troublesome around others so I taught myself to only do it when I touch salt, but now whenever I touch salt I have to do it,
this wasn't supposed to be about this, I've probably talked about this before, so let's move on,

What does one do with sentimental trinkets; the secret collection of anime on VHS; letters from friends that are overly dramatic in that teenage way, when you're carving out your capacity but haven't experienced shit. We used to be so fatalistic.
I have noticed recently that I don't care to use question marks. It is not that I dislike them or am so sure of myself that nothing I say is a question; it is as though they are too cloying and too big at the end of the sentence, taking up too much attention like the riddler symbol, dominating,
that's not what this is about,

The thing is, this is the stuff that I decided to keep after the Great Post-High School Purge, during which threw away so many things, books filled with crappy drawing and you know the trinkets, little toys given ironic significance by the rare friend. Yet I still seem to have kept so much. Stiffened old t-shirts with The Strokes and Incubus logos on them that I'd never put on again. So many ill-fitting bras. Ugly beaded necklaces that were popular in the 90s. Tiny slips of paper with the phone numbers of girls I knew in the hospital.

My co-worker just walked by and asked what I was doing, then laughed at my answer ("... journaling." [i knew i'd been caught]). I don't know why I'm having this sudden outpouring. It is the box that I blame. I was feeling odd and unwell but now I'm feeling pretty foxy, pretty ready, you wouldn't believe what I can handle (anything), la la laaaa fuck it.

oh hello

i mostly write secret thoughts in a paper journal because writing without writing what i'm really feeling is shitty because i'm a stupid girl

here's a poem i writ at work that one week it was really hot outside and I lost my mind

SO FUCKING HOT

(a work poem)

tinea versicolor,

left nipple ring,

ganglion cysts,

bilateral wrists,

when asked what the single most

important thing is

which makes him angry,

the patient said,

"people who lie"

backin dat up

mad

"My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time;
they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and
disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away.
Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me
restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I
would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm
curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the
earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can
spare myself little sleep."

frank o'hara, meditations in an emergency

i am going to enjoy this new class

\
Countdown until I start seeing monsters everywhere...

i'm even boring myself

my new official theme song:

i recently started dreaming again

the deaf man can read

the lips of the waitress

except when she says

"how do you want your whiskey"

"how do you want your whiskey"

she tries to write it on a napkin

nerves trembling her hands

later they are married

in a bed on an island or peninsula

they wrestle and sigh

"what happens now" she says

"a dolphin jumps into the bed"

and then a dolphin jumps

into the bed, dappled gray

and bewildered

i keep injuring myself

what is going on

is it
the moon

ladies' night

chchchchch

this time they're not my own boxes
and the boxes do not contain my things
i am just a peripheral to this exodus
the beetle who bears the bones westward -ho
my back is strong and will not let your
books fall down, let me take your body on
my shoulders, let's confront
this change together
let us winnow at the old statues we made
of each other

get to know a vegetable

Hello, some kind of asian radish. I grew you from a seed, and don't think you are fully grown yet, but as big as twice the thickness of my thumb. Sliced open you look like purple-y raw ham. I didn't know what to do with you so I sauteed you in butter with onions that grew a few rows down. And then fried two eggs the chickens laid today on top. You kind of kick ass, burning and spicy and crisp when raw and maintaining that crispness though losing most of the heat when lightly cooked. You have both simplicity and textural possibility; I am looking forward to mashing you in some way in the future.

I love you,

Sarah

i.v.

misinformation

It wasn't two days til payday, it was actually five days til payday.

I'm mostly too anxious to eat though feeling really loaded with problems until I distract myself briefly on the internet.

Thank you for listening, internet.

Update: There is something magical and rare for me about when a proper boozing hour rolls around and you've been basically immobile all day though man. Makes my collar feel blue, this luxury of a day wasted. I think I am going to walk two blocks to Guerrero Mart and buy a cherry cola from the machine out front.

two days til payday

It's unfortunate when the cause of your up-all-night stomach illness could possibly have been one of three of the five ingredients in the three-days-til-payday scrounged meal. I generally consider my inner acids capable of at least trouncing some stray bacteria as my black coffee and hot sauce intake have, in my imagination, produced within me a bile which, if I could spray it from my mandibles like a giant radioactive ant, would melt walls and furniture like a knife through carrot cake.
Last night I was siiiick. Today I am better, fine, I am fine. But not knowing which of the ingredients, exactly, has put me in a tricky situation of deciding which of them I can safely consume for the next two days. There is a dubious onion. There is an untrustworthy potato. There is shifty-eyed cheddar. Etc.

m t

For the past month or so I've started a number of entries for this here thing.  I start typing on some idea then, inevitably, my interest wanders away or I assess whatever I've written to be of embarrassingly little interest to anyone and I close the browser window.  

I guess I guess I want to share with my friends and not my enemies, the latter of which are defined as anyone who wishes me harm and the former as everyone else.  This is not paranoia or an inflation of self-importance.  There's a lot of why, why not, why, why not, why, why not in regards to writing continually about oneself.  I've recently concluded that it's kind of become what I "do" with writing though, more-so than poetry even; small vignettes of things I think, or things that happen to me, colored to amuse.  I have found examples of success in similar genres, like DF Wallace; he knows more complicated words than I do.  I am not on this level and know I probably never will be.  Anyway.  This style feels uncomfortably of narcissism.  Aside but not-Aside: Last night I was on my guest bed in the dark guest bedroom in the lightning and hail storm, ill-obsessed with the idea of what it's like to kiss me, the person, and hold me, and love me.  What I know of my face I assume is a carefully staged series of expressions tailored specially for mirrors and photographs.  You know this, I know this, I'm just saying I wish I had some kind of hovering playback camera to show me how I'm seen; what I feel like.  This is brought on by being baffled at the motives of others.  I'm getting too deep in here.  Writing about things that I experienced is like that delayed playback, for others, from within my head.  

I could not eventually envision making out with myself.  I would get close, but the barrier between my self and Myself remained thick and sinuous.   

Always I feel I am missing some sort of larger trend in my selfness.  Here I am here I am here I ammmmmm.  I've probably written something very much like this before.  I feel frequently empty of newness, just a slow, turning, shell-less cephalopod in the ocean deep, worried with its own minor troubles.  

miscommunication

(FX: little "thock" of facebook chat message popping open)

francesco
ciao
Sarah
ciao francesco
francesco
come va
francesco
cisei
Sarah
i only speak english my dear
francesco
io sicilia
Sarah
tragic
francesco
tu non parli italiano
Sarah
no italiano!
francesco
ai msn
Sarah
msn? i do not have.
francesco
come
Sarah
i don't think our love will work.
francesco
vuoi il mio
Sarah
your what?
francesco está desconectado

excerpts from Jean L. Briggs's 1970 "Never In Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family"

"It was some days before I made the happy discovery that the Eskimos themselves rarely adapted their activities to the presence of a visitor.  They exchanged smiles with a visitor when he appeared, and talked a bit now and again if there was something to talk about.  Eventually, if the visitor stayed long enough, as he usually did, the hostess would probably serve a kettle of tea.  But for the most part the visitor either spontaneously joined the family's activities or sat quietly on the periphery, ignored, to my foreign eye.  If the host had business elsewhere he simply announced the fact and went out, whereupon it was incumbent upon the guest to leave also.

My neighbors were the most benign and considerate of visitors.  ... The eskimos, unlike these others, never begged, never demanded.  They frequently offered to trade bone toys for tobacco or for bits of my carefully hoarded food supplies, but they rarely complained of the amounts I gave them.  They were never noisy or obtrusive; they just sat, quiet and observant, around the edges of my tent.  If, out of concern for my dwindling tea and kerosene supplies, I let them sit unfed for more than two or three hours, one of the adults might remark on the warming qualities of tea or, more indirectly still, ask if my water supply was low and offer to replenish it."  (26)

(On iglus)  "'Snow' falls also from the canvas roof; the steam from the boiling tea collects there and freezes into long frost-feathers which precipitate in fine, cold prickles on one's face as the dwelling cools.

The Eskimos accept these minor annoyances with equanimity.  They agree that it is unpleasant (hujuujag, not quvia) to be cold and wet, but what can one do (ayuqnaq)?  So when a sudden rain makes a sieve of the canvas roof they laugh: 'We are wet like dogs.'" (31)

"For several days we moved camp at least once a day and sometimes oftener, and always when the water had arrived within inches of our doorsteps.  Once as we were setting up the tents for the third or fourth time, I asked the friend who was helping me: 'Does the water come up this high?' (I indicated the spot where we were placing the tents.)  'Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't,' was the reply."  (33)

"One such evening I observed to Inuttiaq that the dogs, who were chained to boulders at the water's edge, were going to get wet during the night.  'Yes, they are,' he said.  And sure enough, in the morning several dogs were standing belly-deep in the flood, their noses pointed stiffly skyward."  (34)

summery

I been meaning to write.

Things got a pleasantness but no cohesion.  

I'm a pedestrian, a pavement pounder.

Tan arms and face.  I'm hot all day but rarely

uncomfortable, more like full of warmth,

gestating new versions of myself,

effusing sticky love for my friends.

Today I made sushi, man that was great.  Now I'm in my underwear.  Man.

opinions in doggerel a vocation, do call

achewood soothes me 

always.

death

My phone no longer turns on, don't call me.  To fix it/see if it can be fixed I'll probably have to go to the store where my hateful ex works.  Ha ha ha!  Awesome.  Hey christopher, when's the next day you don't work?  Let me know via e-mail, as I don't have a phone.  

So that's been my morning, woke up at 7, struggled with phone for an hour, fell asleep (weeping bitterly) for four more hours, with this horrific cough/sinus infection that won't go away, dreamed epically about escapes, etc.  Lots of photography?  There was a part where I for some reason was taking artistic topless shots of myself on campus at night.  I do not know why I was doing this.  But some creepy guy started following me around and just watching me, and in the dream I became really uncomfortable and like "why can't i just have my tits out without perverts all watching me!?"

Later in the more epic part of the dream there was a beautiful, thin blonde woman sleeping nude in a hammock in the sunshine, covered in a knit yellow blanket with fishnet-like holes so that you could see through.  This woman didn't like me, in the dream, but I thought this was the most striking thing I'd ever seen and took photograph after photograph of her sleeping like that from all angles, until she woke up and almost caught me.  Then I was looking at the photos (I had taken them with my phone) and woke up writhing.

To day do, due, do to day, today:

wash and clothe self

figure out if parents are coming for mothers day/not

clean up cat puke from bedroom floor

plant lavender and rosemary plants in pots

wash three dozen eggs from farm

make a lot of deviled eggs or something

Oh yes I have a big garden now, on a farm, it is the most wonderful thing and will make my summer wonderful.  There are donkeys, and chickens, and turkeys, and guineas, and fainting goats, and a big tawny yellow lab named Scotch.  Soon there will be tomatoes, peppers of all kinds, radishes, onions, carrots, peas, beans, herbs, ETC ETC ETC!!!!  I will feed you all.  You will love it.

friday

The first drink of the night still gives me goosebumps; makes me purr.  

Sometimes I expect people

to be able to

give me what I need

if I want them to

hard enough.

This interplay is like

describing dreams

to one another.  

(Inevitably, both parties

are left disappointed

and feeling more 

removed from each

other than before.)

outside

Spent the evening on the fire escape in a white lawn chair, reading and smoking and drinking rum & orange soda.  

I get a kind of voyeuristic rear-window-y thrill from learning of my alley.  A neighbor cleans his car, whistling along to that "Better Shape Up" song from Grease.  A friend walks by, and I almost yell down at him to tell him I still have his corkscrew, but don't for fear of startling the friend and the other neighbors, and drawing attention to myself.  A man walks up the fire escape in the building opposite to the top floor, where he spends a moment before being chased out by a girl saying she's fucking done with him, and he seems pretty done too.  She watches him go all the way back down.   The moon is big and becomes steadily more concentrated.  

Across the alley people are hanging out in front of that building where people are always hanging out.  Things seem steadily amicable until, at dusk, voices suddenly raise like posturing tomcats and the black guy tells the white guy to watch himself and the white guy calls the black guy a fucking nigger and the black guy says that's exactly what i'm talking about and one of them drives off.  Birds land closer to me than you'd expect and preen suspiciously.  I drop my lighter through the cracks in the fire escape.  An unseen neighbor below is whining about roommate drama.     

When the light's nearly gone the bats come, leafy black sacs dripping from crevices in brick and careening erratically with their velvet wings and dainty metallic "skree, skree."

facebook is reading my blog

Except the Muslim one I... I can't explain that.  

work

Sometimes at work when I'm given a rather open-ended project, I find myself staring out the window for long stretches. There's some kind of pretty maple tree that tosses its branches like a pony tosses its head when it's windy. A lot of cars drive by on 9th Street, sometimes police cars. Whenever someone walks by my desk, I pick up a piece of paper and act like I was in the middle of reading a document. Mostly I think about fucking.
I miss being in class this week already, in spite of the hassle. I miss the long quiet stretches of not-at-home time; when it's not possible to deal with your life as you could if you were at home, and you are somewhat trapped in this state of depressurized thought-floating. Home becomes too familiar at times, and requires that you look at the facts of yourself. Home crystallizes one's relationship with oneself. This is not to say Home is a place of frequent ill feeling, not at all.

Sometimes I feel as though I work for an elephant in a suit, all ponderous thought and movement and sometimes indecipherable reasoning, trunk/hands swaying in front of him.
"This is just elephant logic," I'll say to myself, writing down and performing a task I don't understand. It makes things easier, to imagine a valiant attempt at inter-species communication.

stupid stupid stupid

stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid

chap chap chap

these are just ideas i need to put somewhere where i can stare at them for awhile that's not a word document i can't seem to be creative in those things anymore i just get panic-attack feelings that accompany beginning an assigned paper

between us there is

a screen which is

a cup which is

a chasm which is

a line which is

a twisted umbilical

of red and yellow wires

in our mouths we must

keep swallowing 

though the length

never lessens,

we are full up with

the casual persistence

of distance

(this is often mistaken

for a wound to suture)

this an animal

which sounds like

a child

Can you look at 

your grandfather 

without crying?

shiiiiiiiiiit

Shit.

mondee

This morning I woke up at 6:30 and was unable to

A) Go back to sleep.

B) Properly self-assess.

It was one of those awful twilighty hours where you're stuck in uneasy consciousness.  Your apartment is cold and your knees hurt, why do they hurt so bad, was it a childhood and adolescence of soccer, is there permanent old-person damage to the cartilage.  

Uninvited, social scenes from the past few days begin playing in your head.  In each of these scenes, your retrospective self is completely unlikeable.  She is too much in the face and the teeth, braying know-it-all-ism and generally irritating.  

There is a growingly bitter loneliness coupled with the feeling that unless life feels like a movie, full of excitement and emotion and laughter and color, your time is being wasted.   

(I took a shower at 9 and am chipper as hell now though.)

sleep and comics

Ray gets me, man.

Is it okay to write a dang blog entry this short... is it allowed?  I want to

get over here let me

entertain you

let me i am

so so so so

good

i slept

too long
i dreamed
in cinema
it's hard
to explain

sucking the venom

Still perhaps the sexiest thing a person can do to a person.

Highlights:

"You're hiking with a friend. The sun is shining, the birds are singing -- you're feeling one with nature. Then the unthinkable happens -- as you step over a tree log on the trail, a snake beneath it lurches out and sinks its fangs into your calf."

"'No way, man! Then we'll both die.'  Is he right? Or, is he just a big coward who should be crossed off your friend list?"

"Non-venomous snakes have round pupils. Venomous snakes have elliptical pupils, like a cat's."

"Of course, this information implies that you're supposed to bend over and peer into the creature's face, which wouldn't be very smart."

" the venomous coral snake and the harmless milk snake, or scarlet snake, look nearly identical, except for the order of their red, black and yellow bands. To tell the difference, children are taught the rhyme, 'Red touch black, venom lack. Red touch yellow, kill a fellow.'"

"You might be wondering how long it would take a venomous snakebite to kill you."

"Tip: If your snakebite kit contains instructions for making an incision on the wound, throw it away and buy a more current kit."

"Using a tourniquet can damage nerves and blood flow. True story: In Tennessee, a well-meaning passerby used a tourniquet to help a farmer who'd been bitten by a snake. When the farmer arrived at the hospital, his blood pressure was so low from the tourniquet around his arm that he was only minutes from death [source: UPI]."

"Be careful -- due to reflex, a snake can actually bite for up to an hour after it's dead."